What the Hell Has Gotten into Jon Stewart Anyway?

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On Wednesday, the two biggest beneficiaries of the Bush administration sat down in a theater in Washington and had a friendly chat about how their last two years had gone. Both had been on remarkable journeys since Bush took office: one man started in the Illinois state legislature and ended up in the White House, while his inquisitor had gone from a profile of the owner of the world's largest bra to an interview with the leader of the free world. A bad interview, but still.

At the moment, Jon Stewart and Barack Obama find themselves in very different positions, one looking for a needed triumph at a Rally to Restore Sanity, the other looking to almost certain defeat at an election to restore insanity. But perhaps they're closer than either of them knew there in the studio. Both had come to occupy a position of power by criticizing those currently in power. And once installed in the firmament, Obama and Stewart have each found, in their own way, that wielding power responsibly and effectively is much more difficult — and much less funny — than hating on George W. Bush.

And let's be honest: Stewart, as he continues to devolve into a national confusion of his own making, really screwed this one up — and not just because he called the president "dude." If the point was to force Obama to answer to his base — and, at the same time, for The Daily Show to prove itself as more than a shill for his administration — then Stewart's enterprise fell flat. As journalism, as comedy, as sanity, even. I mean, he asked six, maybe nine substantive questions in a full-episode interview — and almost all of them had been answered elsewhere: Obama was asked about why things aren't going so well as he hoped by a veteran at a town hall meeting on September 20 and by Katie Couric back in February; about the distance between his rhetoric and his achievements by Times reporter Peter Baker earlier this month; and about difficulties getting the economy going by Brian Williams in August. Even the one question that got major play, when Stewart brought up Larry Summers, was neither original nor effective, since Rolling Stoneasked an even more pointed version of the question in a cover story a couple weeks back, along with variations on many of Stewart's other inquiries.

But there was this: Obama's sarcastic jibe that "If your point is that overnight we did not transform the health-care system, that point is true" rose to the spirit of the occasion. And it was, importantly, prefaced by this: "I don't want to lump you in with a bunch of other pundits...." The host demurred — this is the president, after all — but the president wasn't wrong. Stewart doesn't like to think of himself as a pundit. Pundits are, like hell, other people — though not, it should be said, other parties. He's willing to admit that there are left-wing pundits. It's just that they're on MSNBC. Stewart is nothing; he is an everyman; he is sane where everyone else is crazy. That's why he is leading the Rally to Restore Sanity. As he put it when announcing the event, he's speaking for the "70 to 80 percent of our population" that is right-thinking (a claim he reiterated on NPR's Fresh Air recently) because "the conversation and process is controlled by the other 15 to 20 percent" — people like, presumably, the president, and all those pundits who aren't Jon Stewart.

But Jon Stewart is a media story unto himself, the anti-pundit turned unnecessary pugilist. And it's gotten to the point where he has blurred the line to the point of failure — where pundits are somehow, at least in election season, more rewarding, if more annoying. For someone interested in going beyond the fray, Stewart hasn't done much to seize his two million viewers a night for much more than bombast and boring. Where there could be lengthy explanations of health-care policy, there is a bizarre Glenn Beck impersonation; where there could be a real usurping of the television media, there is a dick-measuring match with Rick Sanchez. And this matters: Stewart's disdain for pundits who abuse the responsibility vested in them as a veritable fourth branch now apply as much to Bill O'Reilly as they do to Stewart. If all he's going to do when face-to-face with the president of the United States is ask the same old questions, I'm not sure why anyone sees Jon Stewart as a success while everyone follows him down the rabbit hole in casting the rest of the bloviators as a undeniable failure.